A Comment on Comments

In the middle of a massive attack of "comment spam" a couple weeks ago, I changed the setting on typepad so that I would have to approve comments before they were posted. It was the only way I could find to stop a wave of links to Italian beastiality sites that were being attached to every single post here, coming in faster than I could delete them. (I sometimes ignore a few ordinary porn links in comment spam, but for some reason I like to get the beastiality links off my home on the internet pretty quickly -- call me a prude.)

But then I didn’t get around to actually approving real legitimate comments, and some readers thought I was deliberately blocking comments. That wasn’t my intent. The attack seems to have ended, and so I’ve turned off the "approve comments" setting, and approved everything legit since then. From now on, all comments should go straight through. I’ve only blocked or deleted actual comments twice in two years, both in the case of extremely abusive language. I apologize for holding up the comments here.

And, I should also add, I’ve been cross-posting almost everything here at TPMcafe.com. Usually there are more comments and a richer discussion at that site, although I certainly appreciate the readers and commentors here.  

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